Terminology

Our prints are pigment on paper prints.

For the last 100 years, prints have been referred to by the materials used to product them, rather than the methods. Platinum Paladium, Silver Gelatin, etc, not as lightbulb and glass sheet, enlarger and easel, etc. The same is true of painted artwork. Oil on canvas - not putty knife and brush. Acrylic on canvas, tempura on wood, so forth and so on. But over the last couple of years, emphasis has switched to the technology used to create the artifact rather than the artifact itself. Lightjet prints (a high end version of your drug store minilab), Lambda prints, Chromira prints, numerous others leading to Inkjet prints.

None of these terms tell you much about what you're getting, do they? The first three are all traditional color negative printing processes - they optically expose the paper with your image (computer controlled of course) and then dunk it in the appropriate chemistry. The fourth option, the Inkjet, squirts a controlled jet of pigment ink onto a surface. The term Giclee was used to describe early inkjet prints, to try to mask the fact that the image came out of a computer controlled ink printer, rather than a computer controlled optical printer. The term is derived from the French "gicler" meaning roughly "to spray" - which describes the method by which the Inkjet applies the ink to the print media. Pigment prints from inkjet printers produce output that can be indistinguishable from darkroom prints produced in traditional methods. There are two main sorts of inkjet prints, those with dye inks, and those with pigment inks. Dye ink prints are not in the same category as pigment ink prints. Pigment inks are as close to permanent as you're going to get with any widely available and affordable printing technology today.

To revert the previous (and more important) way of putting it - these prints are pigment on paper. That means they are permanent images printed on a high quality cotton rag art paper. It doesn't really matter if the pigment came out of an inkjet printer, off brush, or from some other method. The bottom line is permanent pigment on archival paper. And please, whatever you do, don't call them giclee!